You will have heard, no doubt, from some of those with whom you conversed about Professor Wilson when you were in Europe, or you may have read it in Peter's Letters, that in very early life (probably about the age of eighteen) he had formed a scheme for penetrating into central Africa, visiting the city of Tombuctoo, and solving (if it were possible) the great outstanding problem of the course of the Niger. To this scheme he was attracted probably not so much by any particular interest in the improvement of geographical knowledge, as by the youthful spirit of romantic adventure, and a very uncommon craving for whatever was grand--indefinite--and gigantic in conception, supposing that it required at the same time great physical powers in the execution. There cannot be a doubt for us at this day, who look back upon the melancholy list of victims in this perilous field of discovery which has been furnished by the two or three and twenty years elapsed since Mr. Wilson's plan was in agitation, that in that enterprise--had he ever irretrievably embarked himself upon it--he would infallibly have perished; for, though reasonably strong, he was not strong upon that heroic scale which an expedition so Titanic demands; and what was perhaps still more important, if strong enough--he was not _hardy_ enough, as a gentleman rarely is, more especially where he has literary habits; because the exposure to open air, which is the indispensable condition of hardiness, is at any rate interrupted--even if it were not counteracted--by the luxurious habits and the relaxing atmosphere of the library and the drawing-room. Moreover, Mr. Wilson's constitution was irritable and disposed to fever; his temperament was too much that of a man of genius not to have furnished a mine of inflammable materials for any tropical climate; his prudence, as regarded his health, was not remarkable; and if to all these internal and personal grounds of danger you add the incalculable hazards of the road itself, every friend of Mr. Wilson's must have rejoiced on hearing that in 1808, when I first met him, this Tim-(or Tom-) buctoo scheme was already laid aside.